


Jersey Devil

by kiiouex, telekinesiskid



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Kavinsky is a content warning, POV Second Person, Warnings For Everything You'd Expect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-27 00:18:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9939422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex, https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid/pseuds/telekinesiskid
Summary: What the fuck did they expect, coming to your party, taking your pills? Haven’t theyheardof you?





	

**Author's Note:**

> We did the thing where tk wrote this and I wrote 'over' it and came up with a nice fic for all you Kavinsky sympathisers :P
> 
> (fuckin help our son)

You hear a lot of rumours. And not just the ones _you_ spread either; you’ve heard yourself painted in stories so ridiculous you wouldn’t have bothered starting them, doing the kind of depraved desecration you don’t have the energy for, told in six-syllable words instead of your usual four-letters. People call you _destructive_ and then they want to take you like a hammer to the face; you’re their pill into Wonderland or Neverland or some other pansy-ass lit shit you only half-remember from middle school. People arrive on your scene _wanting_ to hate you, and then every single little thing you do becomes fuel for their fire. They’re always so delighted by you, floored by you, disgusted by you.

At some point along the way, the threat of you turned into a myth. Kids dare their friends to take one of your pills the same way kids dare their friends to set foot inside haunted mansions. People treat you like the goddamn devil _,_ and you can only do so much to live up that, if you want to live up to that, which you do less and less. It was flattering when you were fourteen and savage; it’s starting to get old. They’re dumb tourists to your world, arriving hyped up for self-destruction and magic and endless, hazy parties, and then they get all disappointed that you don’t have a tail for them to yank on.

It’s tiring, how hard a time they have grasping that you are _real_. You are not a stale bag of empty threats. You are not what happens when naughty children stay up past their bedtime or rebel against their parents. You are an atom bomb ticking down to some invisible trigger, but because no one’s actually _found_ the bodies they still play chicken with you. There are the rumours you start, and the rumours _they_ start, and somewhere between them you’ve become a wraith, at once toothless and terrifying. You still get written off – because you’re dangerous, a cokehead, public nuisance, a menace, but how bad could you be, really? What’s the worst you could actually _do_?

One day, you think, one day they might just fucking find out.

 

As it turns out, a lot of places aren’t really tolerant of rampant drug abuse and reactional arson, so you find yourself getting creative with the venues. Sometimes it’s an abandoned factory down the road from Dickie, with dank, flooded basements and mouldy chaise lounges and mushrooms growing up through the splintered floorboards. Sometimes it’s an abandoned arcade with kicked-in screens and sad-looking ball pits and candy from 2003 that has lost all its colour and disintegrates in your mouth. More often than not, though, it’s a rust and bone-laden field in the middle of nowhere, of which Henrietta has no short supply. Good for space, good for a show.

You don’t care who comes to your parties; it’s not a thing you keep track of. You tell a couple of mates and word gets out, somehow or another. You only ever expect it to be you and your pack, but another twenty or thirty stragglers usually find it and show up anyway. There’s always a load of out-of-town college kids who pile out of their hotboxed ’88 Civic to take blurry too-close shots of the pyrotechnics. There’s always kids who snuck out after dark and got caught between the blazing wreckage of three crashed Evos and the exit. It doesn’t bother you; the more the merrier and all that.

 

It’s a little embarrassing, more so for you than them. You just sit in the passenger side of a doorless, engineless frame of a vehicle, stripped of its parts right down to the skeleton, waiting for your corn dog that’s deep-frying in the hood of another Mitsu – the result of dreaming when hungry. People approach you, either alone or in pairs, and they should know better than to call you “Joey K” to your face, but sometimes you’d prefer that to the stupid shit they ask you. You never know what request you’re going to get next. One minute it’s something boss and PI-worthy like “Can you frame my step-father for murder? I want his racist ass out of my life” and the next it’s “Can you replicate my girlfriend’s phone? I want to see every message that she sends and receives. I think she’s cheating on me because last Sunday—” and that’s usually when you collect your hot dog and threaten to dowse whoever it is that won’t shut up in hot oil.

“Keep it brief,” you say, and does anyone fucking listen? You’ve only ever had one rule; you hope you’re not asking too much of people for following your _one rule._

You know that what you’re doing isn’t really any different to what your father did, back in Bulgaria. You take requests, and you ask for payment in the form of illicit substances or raw cash. Failing that, you’ll take favours and obedience. Failing _that_ , you’ll take kneecaps. Or teeth, eyes, skin – whatever they’re able to part with, and you don’t mean emotionally.

Roughly ninety percent of your trade is fake IDs, and you already perfected that art with your own – your name is Ivan Karamanski, you’re twenty-three years old, your birthdate varies from license to license so long as it’s not your real one. People always ask for an approximation of how long it’ll take it, and the truth is that it could be anywhere from three days to three months. Depends how busy you are with your main product and your regular orders. Depends how long it takes to convince Lynch to come see you. Depends whether you’ve got any scrap of motivation at all. Depends on a lot of things.

You blow smoke in their faces. “It’ll be ready when it’s ready. What shit’s in that baggie? Fuck it, just toss it over.”

 

In rarer moments, you’re quiet. You push your shades back over your eyes and watch some idiot upchuck bits of mushed Taco Bell and $500 champagne on the hood of a Mitsu you no longer want, and you think about death. You think about leaving your mark on the world. You want to scar it. You want to shred it, scourge the land like a hurricane made of shrapnel. You want to infect it, to pollute it, to take as many fuckers as you can down with you. You want everyone to look back on the shittiest, most fucked up thing in their lives, some great gaping crater, a toxic lesion, a fucking fallout zone, and you want them to think “Joseph Kavinsky did that. Fuck him.”

 

Sometimes parties are just parties, but sometimes parties are opportunities to try out your latest pills, and in that case you welcome the many nobodies that wander in. You pass around red pills, free of charge, tell people it’ll take them to space, get their rocks off, stop their heart, whatever’ll get it in their mouths. People take it, chase it down, and in a handful of groggy minutes a whole musty room of yelling, laughing, belching kids has plummeted into silence and stillness.

You walk over the bodies that dropped to the floor, the spilled beers, the blunts that you stamp out under your heel to prevent fires, because there’s no way an inferno would wake these fuckers up from the sleep you put them under. You stare at the bodies packed into the couches, slumped and relaxed and entwined. You could do anything to them, fucking _anything_ , and they wouldn’t hear of it until tomorrow.

For a minute you watch the finite rise and fall of someone’s chest. You bend down to your boy Proko and rest two fingers under his jaw. Still a pulse. Slow, but undoubtedly there. Not dead this time. You stroke a hand over his face, slow and horribly tender, and then help yourself to the bottle spilling out over his shirt.

You have absolute power over every one of your guests, but it’s been months since you felt like exploiting it. You tip a body out of a chair to take his place and rest your feet on his back. The little baggie of reds still has a few inside, and you hold it up to take a picture, including the dozen or so conked-out bodies in the backdrop. You send it to your regulars. You txt, _works fast, lasts 6 hours. $25 a pop, $1000 a bag._

You drop your phone on the back of whoever’s asleep next to you and take a sip of Proko’s half-finished beer, settling in. You _know_ that the pills last six hours, but you also know that Greenmantle will send over someone to pull your head off if any one of these not-so-willing participants wake up even a minute before you started the clock. It’s going to be a long night.

You text Lynch to pass the time. You think about slipping one of the reds past his teeth and rubbing it down his neck. You think about throwing him up against the hood of your Evo and colouring the gaps in his tattoo a deep bruisy purple, digging teeth into his shoulder, filling your head with white space. He’d never cook up anything like this, and it’s a shame, and it’s a waste, and it fills you with such a hateful heat.

In the morning, most people are willing to assume they had a good night they just don’t remember, and shuffle out sore and bleary. The confused ones, the scared ones, the angry ones, they come to you and you tell them to fuck off. What the fuck did they expect, coming to your party, taking your pills? Haven’t they _heard_ of you? They get to go home in one piece; they should count themselves lucky.

More rumours circulate, more lies spread. Still, people keep coming back.

 

People ask you all the time where you get all this shit from, what kinds of powerful contacts you must have, what infinite pool of resources you must be sitting on. You tap your temple, you smile knowingly, you let smoke lick up one side of your face as you hold your blunt too close. “Home Depo,” you say, and they stop listening. “A little Home Depo in the middle of the woods. Good place. Everything’s free. A fag who likes me owns it.”

You check your phone for any new messages.

You don’t know if he’s _ever_ liked you.

 

People ask you when it is you _sleep,_ because you never seem to, and you smile at that, because you haven’t fucking slept since you were fourteen and you discovered what you could do instead. You haven’t slept longer than six minutes in the past year. Lots of teensy naps makes up for it, you say, but you know that it doesn’t, and any fucking idiot with his head screwed on could see what it’s doing to you. You’re eroding, like some dream thing gone bad, impossibility collapsing into rot. Every inch of you is deteriorating at different speeds, and it’s not as if a real meal and a decent night’s sleep is going to save you.

Some know-it-all asshole actually once said to your face, “Studies show that people who sleep less than seven hours each night are at increased risk for disease, disability, and death.”

You gave him your nicest grin, with all your terrible teeth.

Your gang spray-painted DISEASE DISABILITY AND DEATH on the side of your Mitsu for you.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, we'd love to hear what you thought! 
> 
> [kiiouex's tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/) | [telekinesiskid's tumblr](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com/)


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